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On Methods and Morals

James Halteman and Edd Noell

in Reckoning with Markets: The Role of Moral Reflection in Economics

Is economics like car building or car repair? Are we working toward a finished product, or are we attempting to answer pertinent questions that arise and change from time to time? These questions are ... More

Is economics like car building or car repair? Are we working toward a finished product, or are we attempting to answer pertinent questions that arise and change from time to time? These questions are entertained in this chapter in order to explore the nature of the methods economists employ. The subjective nature of data and the relevance of predicting from past trendsis explored. The proof that rational choice analysis predicts better than any alternative process is seen to be less than definitive by typical standards of proof. Welfare economics comes closest to philosophy when it optimizes social welfare with a social welfare function, but the ramifications of that model are rarely explored. Finally, it is suggested that key questions change and economic thinking then adapts to deal with the new challenges. The vignette for this chapter looks at John Maynard Keynes and his rethinking of mainstream macroeconomics.Less

Homo Economicus on Trial: Towards an Ethic of Stewardship

Sanjay Kabir Bavikatte

in Stewarding The Earth: Rethinking Property and the Emergence of Biocultural Rights

This chapter lays the theoretical foundations of biocultural rights by making the case that the widespread belief in the naturalness and universality of market values lacks the rigour of proper ... More

This chapter lays the theoretical foundations of biocultural rights by making the case that the widespread belief in the naturalness and universality of market values lacks the rigour of proper historical analysis. The chapter then goes on to establish that it is the ethic of stewardship or care that is widespread amongst traditional communities across the world, while the predominance of market values is a symptom of late capitalism. An argument is made that the contemporary global movement of indigenous peoples and traditional communities is a strategic assertion of set pre-capitalist values in an unprecedented political space, created due to the ecological crisis caused by capitalism.Less

Economic Markets and the Rise of Interactive Agencements: From Prosthetic Agencies to Habilitated Agencies

Michel Callon

in Living in a Material World: Economic Sociology Meets Science and Technology Studies

This chapter discusses the modalities and effects of the contribution of markets as networks to the process of individualization, and characterizes the functioning and constitution of the ... More

This chapter discusses the modalities and effects of the contribution of markets as networks to the process of individualization, and characterizes the functioning and constitution of the socio-technical agencements that shape homo economicus 2.0 in the fields of design, production, distribution, or consumption. The advantages of the concept of the agency are discussed along with examples. An agencement transforms a situation by producing differences, and it is a philosophical concept whose proponents are considered as representatives of a French pragmatist tradition. The author also discusses interactive individual agency, social handicap policy, prosthetic policies, and habilitation policies. Both the prosthesis and habilitation approaches aim to compose an individual agent, but prosthesis acts on the person and habilitation strives to transform the environment.Less

Economic Decisions and Institutional Boundaries

Evelyn Korn and Johannes Ziesecke

in Comparative Decision Making

Microeconomics is one of the oldest and best-developed approaches to understanding decision making and is thus a fitting topic to begin this survey. The authors present Homo economicus, the perfectly ... More

Microeconomics is one of the oldest and best-developed approaches to understanding decision making and is thus a fitting topic to begin this survey. The authors present Homo economicus, the perfectly rational decision maker, and confront him with institutions, the rules constraining his choices. Hamlet, perhaps the most famous equivocator in all literature, is likewise faced with various conundrums here. Who makes decisions anyway, and what is the basis for making them? This leads to Bentham’s concept of individual utility, updated by Samuelson’s empirical notion of revealed preferences that evades the problem of establishing intentionality. It emerges that separating the intrinsic motivation of the decision maker from external enforcement mechanisms is almost impossible in the revealed-preferences framework. Microeconomists are increasingly concerned about understanding the biases and limitations of human reasoning that give rise to the concept of bounded rationality.Less

Economic rationality

Barbara Townley

in Reason's Neglect: Rationality and Organizing

Economic rationality is a part of the taken-for-granted assumptions of how organizations are understood and studied. Organizations have economic purpose and intent; organizational structures, ... More

Economic rationality is a part of the taken-for-granted assumptions of how organizations are understood and studied. Organizations have economic purpose and intent; organizational structures, systems, and policies are designed to achieve goals or ends. Ergo, organizations are rational. All this notwithstanding, there is an abundance of literature illustrating that organizations often follow purposes and objectives which do not make strict economic sense and that structures, systems, and purposes are rarely designed and often fail to achieve stated intent or purpose. Although economic rationality is often presented as a discrete, coherent, and readily identifiable mode of rationality, it elides a series of confusions and contestations: disputed definitions of rationality; disagreements as to what behaviours typify it and how it may be identified; and strong objections to the characterization of its dominant actor, homo economicus. Its genesis, both from debates about the nature of individual autonomy and from the disciplinary development of economic thought, where rationality arrives as a relative latecomer, reveals a series of discrete strands of literatures and debates that coalesce in a generic, rather fragmented, understanding. These various strands and how they have impacted on organizations form the basis of this chapter.Less

Homo Economicus Must Die: Towards a Figure of the Accumulated Being

Steven Threadgold

in Bourdieu and Affect: Towards a Theory of Affective Affinities

Chapter Seven makes the argument, like many others, that the dominant figures used to stand in for humans, such as Homo economicus and cultural dupe, are anthropological monsters. The chapter also ... More

Chapter Seven makes the argument, like many others, that the dominant figures used to stand in for humans, such as Homo economicus and cultural dupe, are anthropological monsters. The chapter also sketches the problem of the figure of the inspirational meritocrat, which aligns with the rise of the happiness and wellness industries and with individual stories of heroically overcoming hardships in movies and media profiles. The Bourdieusian model of the reasonable accumulated being is then put forward as a way of overcoming the problems of those figures as it considers how affective affinities mediate everyday struggles and strategies that move beyond the rational, ideological and entrepreneurial.Less

Curing the “Disease” in Corporatized Higher Education: Prescriptions from the Catholic Social Tradition

Gerald J. Beyer

in Working Alternatives: American and Catholic Experiments in Work and Economy

This chapter treats the corporatization of higher education in the United States. In particular, the chapter contends that corporatized higher education has imported individualistic practices and ... More

This chapter treats the corporatization of higher education in the United States. In particular, the chapter contends that corporatized higher education has imported individualistic practices and models from the business world, modern economics, and more broadly neoliberal capitalism into higher education. A vision of the human person as selfish, hypercompetitive, solipsistic, and unwilling to sacrifice for the common good (homo economicus) undergirds these models and practices. The chapter discusses the so-called Dickeson model and Responsibility Centered Management (RCM) to illustrate the kinds of practices that flow from this anthropology. It also advances the argument that harmful “symptoms” of the corporatization of higher education such as the casualization of the academic workforce (known as “adjunctification”) have been accepted, at least partially, as a result this flawed understanding of human person. The second half of the essay turns to the Catholic social tradition to prescribe some possible “cures” to the “disease” in corporatized higher education.Less

Reality Check

Quassim Cassam

in Self-Knowledge for Humans

To subject a philosophical account of self-knowledge to a ‘reality check’ is to ask whether the proposed account is psychologically realistic. Just as behavioural economics tries to provide the ... More

To subject a philosophical account of self-knowledge to a ‘reality check’ is to ask whether the proposed account is psychologically realistic. Just as behavioural economics tries to provide the discipline of economics with more realistic psychological foundations, so philosophical accounts of self-knowledge need to ensure that they also have realistic psychological foundations. The distinction between homo sapiens and homo philosophicus is similar to Thaler and Sunstein’s distinction between homo sapiens and homo economicus. Rationalist and other philosophical accounts of self-knowledge are open to the objection that they are psychologically unrealistic. However, the relevant psychological facts are not beyond dispute. A distinction is drawn between three different senses in which an account of self-knowledge can qualify, or fail to qualify, as an account of self-knowledge ‘for humans’, an application sense, a conception sense, and a guidance sense.Less

Homo economicus judaicus and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1848–1914

Derek J. Penslar

in Shylock's Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe

This chapter discusses the flourishing of commercial and industrial capitalism in nineteenth-century Europe that strengthened the historic association between Jews and Trade. For Jews, as for any ... More

This chapter discusses the flourishing of commercial and industrial capitalism in nineteenth-century Europe that strengthened the historic association between Jews and Trade. For Jews, as for any ethnic minority that falls into a particular economic niche, economic distinctiveness may engender or reinforce group identity. The Homo economicus judaicus, who was glorified by middle-class Jews in western Europe, was one of their own kind or a heroic progenitor of bourgeois Jewish society. When bourgeois Jews turned their attention from themselves to eastern Europe, their visages darkened. Impoverished eastern European Jews, particularly the millions who traveled westward, became the site of a different kind of Jewish social knowledge and the object of a new academic language: that of scientific philanthropy.Less

Homo Comparativus: Status, Honor, and Prestige

Gloria Origgi

in Reputation: What It Is and Why It Matters

This chapter proposes the replacement of the idea of homo economicus as the ontologically fundamental unit of social science with the idea of homo comparativus. It explains the claim that reality can ... More

This chapter proposes the replacement of the idea of homo economicus as the ontologically fundamental unit of social science with the idea of homo comparativus. It explains the claim that reality can be perceived only through evaluative comparisons, eroding the traditional distinction between description and evaluation. The chapter also discusses and criticizes other philosophical approaches that put symbolic values similar to reputation at the center of the analysis of human action, including the economy of esteem defended by Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit and Anthony Appiah's theory of honor. Honoring others is always a double-edged sword. Acts of deference signal something about both those who defer and those to whom deference is paid. This chapter talks about the measure of social consensus on the practices and norms of according esteem if people are to strike a proper balance between the need to satisfy personal preferences when granting respect to others and the demands of social conformity that drives people to recognize others in order to make themselves more “acceptable” to the peer group to which they belong.Less

Republic Inc.

Jason Blakely

in We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power

Popular claims to a science of economics have had an enormous impact on reshaping the nature of democracy in Europe and the United States. This chapter uncovers how a popular vision of human beings ... More

Popular claims to a science of economics have had an enormous impact on reshaping the nature of democracy in Europe and the United States. This chapter uncovers how a popular vision of human beings as egoistic preference maximizers (known to philosophers as homo economicus) played a major role in this transformation. Drawing on the authority and technical sophistication of economic rational choice theory, this popular discourse gave birth to a “market polis” in which all human relations are reimagined as transactional. The result has been the presentation of an egoistic form of citizenship, deficient in social solidarity, as if it were simply a fundamentally scientific view of political life. This has contributed to the move away from earlier notions of the public good (both in the New Deal and the founding of the republic) as well as backsliding toward increasingly authoritarian and antidemocratic forms of politics.Less

Neoliberal Governmentality

Miguel de Beistegui

in The Government of Desire: A Genealogy of the Liberal Subject

This chapter argues that the complex phenomenon known as neoliberalism reveals a radicalization and further internalization of the economic regime of desire, which defines liberalism, and which ... More

This chapter argues that the complex phenomenon known as neoliberalism reveals a radicalization and further internalization of the economic regime of desire, which defines liberalism, and which consists in a normalization of subjectivity through the promotion of self-interest and the maximization of utility. But it also departs from liberalism on a few key aspects, and introduces new norms and new technologies of desire. So, whilst neoliberalism inherits the normative framework initially introduced by the likes of James Stuart, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill, it also builds on it, and innovates: to the norms of interest and utility, through which individuals experience and govern their own subjectivity, it adds those of competition, efficiency, and management (of one’s life, one’s human capital, and the risks one is willing or encouraged to take). It sees those norms as inseparable, and as revealing the true mechanisms behind the actions and motivations of human beings.Less

Ideas of Reason

Susan Neiman

in Performance and Progress: Essays on Capitalism, Business, and Society

The 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington were, among other things, an attack on a particular notion of rationality. The contempt of the attackers for that notion connects them to members ... More

The 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington were, among other things, an attack on a particular notion of rationality. The contempt of the attackers for that notion connects them to members of the US Tea Party and right-wing nationalist groups currently opposing the EU. Such groups have in common a rejection of Homo economicus, the human being considered “solely as a being who desires wealth, and who is capable of judging the comparative efficiency of means for obtaining that end” (John Stuart Mill). A notion of reason based on Kant is introduced which should serve as an alternative. The major question for further research remains: given that the Homo economicus model of human motivation has been undermined by recent research in primatology, psychology, neurobiology, and even by many economists, why does it continue to exercise such a hold on us?Less

Greed and the Adventures of Homo economicus

Louçã Francisco and Ash Michael

in Shadow Networks: Financial Disorder and the System that Caused Crisis

A reflection on greed and culture is provided. Literature and films, from the Bible to Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, are reviewed for the ways they have both expressed and shaped public views on greed. ... More

A reflection on greed and culture is provided. Literature and films, from the Bible to Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, are reviewed for the ways they have both expressed and shaped public views on greed. Yet greed is only a part of the human picture. History, as well as rigorous new evidence from social psychology and behavioral economics, shows that humans juggle egoism, altruism, reciprocity, and solidarity in proportions that vary across time and space. Inequality grew sharply in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, with a special role for finance.Less

Why Desire?

Miguel de Beistegui

in The Government of Desire: A Genealogy of the Liberal Subject

Desire is everywhere – everywhere recognized, displayed, discussed, and drawn upon. It is so much part of our lives, so deeply entrenched in our bodies and minds that we cannot imagine a life without ... More

Desire is everywhere – everywhere recognized, displayed, discussed, and drawn upon. It is so much part of our lives, so deeply entrenched in our bodies and minds that we cannot imagine a life without it, indeed cannot imagine what it could mean to live without experiencing its force and appeal, but also the conflicts and struggles it gives rise to. The Introduction calls this assumption into question by treating desire not as a transcendental feature of subjectivity, or a basic structure of our psychical life, but as an historical normative process, to which individuals are subjected: the manner in which we understand ourselves as subjects of desire, and the meaning we attribute to it, was shaped historically. Our experience of desire, the Introduction argues, was shaped by the emergence of three discourses - political economy, the scientia sexualis, and the philosophy of recognition - to which correspond the concepts of self-interest, sexual instinct, and longing for recognition. Together, they constitute an assemblage of knowledge and power through which we are constituted as liberal subjects: the homo economicus, sexualis, and symbolicus define the modern "Man of Desire".Less

Petrarch as Homo Economicus

William J. Kennedy

in Petrarchism at Work: Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare

This chapter looks at evidence which situates Petrarch at the intersection of Renaissance aesthetics and economics. Specifically, it considers the literary devices and syntax used in a number of his ... More

This chapter looks at evidence which situates Petrarch at the intersection of Renaissance aesthetics and economics. Specifically, it considers the literary devices and syntax used in a number of his sonnets, which express both a Platonic and an Aristotelian aesthetics. Furthermore, the chapter examines the worth of poetry in fourteenth-century economics, especially during the economic upheaval that followed the devastation of the Black Death from 1348 onward. During this time, questions about exchange value, labor value, and use and utility values commanded unprecedented attention. Given this context, the chapter traces how Petrarch had come to himself afloat in the evolutionary sea-change of late fourteenth-century economic relations.Less

Introduction

in The Ridiculous Jew: The Exploitation and Transformation of a Stereotype in Gogol, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky

This introductory chapter first sets out the book's purpose, to explore the Jewish stereotype in the works of three prominent Russian writers of the nineteenth century—Nikolai Gogol's Taras Bulba, ... More

This introductory chapter first sets out the book's purpose, to explore the Jewish stereotype in the works of three prominent Russian writers of the nineteenth century—Nikolai Gogol's Taras Bulba, Ivan Turgenev's “The Jew,” and Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from the House of the Dead. The focus is on the ways in which Gogol, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky exploit the stereotype of the ridiculous Jew for different literary and cultural ends. The chapter then discusses representations of the Jew as devil and homo economicus, the good Jew, the inscribable Jew, Jewish assimilation and conversion, and the Jewish body. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.Less

Rule of, by, and for the People: For an Apophatic Democracy?

Fred Dallmayr

in Democracy to Come: Politics as Relational Praxis

Probing the meaning of Lincoln’s phrase, the chapter calls into question the prevalent conceptions of “rule” and “people.” In the dominant procedural or “minimalist” conception, the “people” are ... More

Probing the meaning of Lincoln’s phrase, the chapter calls into question the prevalent conceptions of “rule” and “people.” In the dominant procedural or “minimalist” conception, the “people” are defined as selfish utility-maximizers; that is, individuals who seek to maximize benefits in exchange for minimal investments. “Rule” is simply government by the most successful self-seekers. The chapter also discusses the (recently advanced) alternative conceptions of “agonistic” and “deliberative” democracy. By contrast to the homo economicus extolled by liberal minimalism, agonistics privileges homo politicus (human beings as power seekers), while the deliberative model stresses rational argumentation (animal rationale). By returning to the criteria of relationality and potentiality, the chapter lifts up the aspirational or “promissory” quality of democracy, paying special attention to Derrida’s notion of “democracy to come” (à venir) and to the open-ended, unfinished character of “people” and humanity. Seen from this angle, democracy can also be called aporetic or “apophatic.”Less

Introduction

David S. Wilson, Alan Kirman, and Julia Lupp

in Complexity and Evolution: Toward a New Synthesis for Economics

How are we to understand economic institutions that are comprised of multiple, interacting individuals who operate on various spatial and temporal scales, all of which are impacted by a myriad of ... More

How are we to understand economic institutions that are comprised of multiple, interacting individuals who operate on various spatial and temporal scales, all of which are impacted by a myriad of factors? Economics has based its efforts largely on general equilibrium theory, yet this dominant paradigm has two fundamental flaws: it assumes that economic systems are at equilibrium and utilizes Homo economicus (a fictitious being) to define preferences, behavior, and abilities. Because these assumptions deviate so drastically from reality, there is doubt whether incremental changes can ever render it effective. Thus, alternative approaches have emerged. Evolutionary theory has brought novel insight to explain the behavior of individuals and institutions, and complexity theory has provided context to understand economies as complex adaptive systems. To permit greater understanding of economics and public policy, this Ernst Strüngmann Forum explored the integration of concepts from complexity theory and evolutionary theory. The hope was that this discourse would spur a synthesis and lead to the creation of a new economic framework—one capable of modeling economic systems as complexly adaptive and frequently out of equilibrium, based on the preferences, behavior, and abilities of real human beings and the diverse processes involved.Less